The Charge

A new day breaks.

The Case

Five seasons in, I'm not totally sure how to feel about the hit USA series
Burn Notice. It was and is an entertaining diversion during the summer
months when most of the other "better" shows are either in reruns or replaced by
D-level reality programming. Burn Notice is cool. Burn Notice is
fun. Burn Notice never changes.

That is the show's blessing and its curse. There's something comfortable
about the Burn Notice's sameness—it's the kind of series you can
drift in and out of during countless summer reruns on cable. On DVD, it's a
cinch to breeze through an entire season in a matter of a couple of days. It's
easy to watch, and even easier to say "Okay, just one more episode." Before you
know it, you've run through 18 shows.

But it hasn't really shown any growth in five seasons, and that could be
frustrating for a lot viewers. Burn Notice has always been two shows in
one. There's the cool villain-of-the-week spy stuff, in which Michael Westen
(Jeffrey Donovan, Blair Witch: Book of Shadows) and his
team—girlfriend Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar, Body Snatchers) and best
friend Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell, The Evil
Dead)—help out people in trouble, by taking down bad guys in clever
and intricate ways. There's Michael Westen's endless voiceover in which he gives
neat spy tips that, even if they're not at all accurate or true, sure sound like
they are. Then there's a deeper mythology about Michael being burned and ditched
by the CIA, and his need to figure out what happened and who's responsible. That
stuff has never really worked; it feels like it's just there so the show isn't
an entirely disposable episode-of-the-week ripoff of something like Magnum P.I. or MacGyver.

By Season Five, Michael has already solved the burn notice case what feels
like four times over and has been reinstated into the CIA—and, yet, he
still can't let it go. It makes the show feel doubly repetitive. While it's easy
to overlook the sameness of the "Michael helps out the downtrodden" storylines,
at least each week offers a new case that keeps it feeling fresh. That can't be
said for the greater mythology.

The season is essentially broken into two halves, primarily because that's
the way USA aired it (there was a "summer season" and then, a few months later,
the second half of the season aired). In the first half, Michael is framed for
the murder of a fellow agent and has to work to clear his name, while still
appearing to cooperate with the investigation being led by Agent Pearce (Lauren
Stamile, Community). In the second half,
Michael and his team are blackmailed into doing the bidding of the mysterious
Anson Fullerton (Jere Burns, Justified), a psychiatrist with
ties to the organization that burned Michael, in order to keep Fiona from going
to prison for life.

The first half, in which Michael attempts to outsmart the CIA before they
catch up with him, is much stronger, if only because it makes more sense. The
extent to which Michael is willing to follow and obey Fullerton just to keep an
innocent friend from going to prison doesn't make much sense; not because he
would want to keep Fiona out of prison. The will they/won't they tension of the
first few seasons is now a thing of the past, but it's not like the show has
replaced it with a relationship that's all that compelling or even worth saving.
Because he's thought his way out of so many other impossible situations that the
fact that he barely even tries to figure a way out of Fullerton's trap stretches
credibility past its breaking point. Michael complies because the series needs
him to.

Burn Notice: Season Five arrives on DVD courtesy of Fox in a package
not unlike every other season. It's disappointing that the show has only
received one HD release (Season Two), because the sunny Miami atmosphere and
cool spy pyrotechnics are never served quite as well as they ought to be by the
standard def DVDs the studio puts out. Still, if this is the best we're going to
get, we could do worse. The 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen image is softer and
hazier than it ought to be, though some of that is a result of the grainy
photography the series has always used. Skin tones lean towards orange, which
(again) is probably because of the show's sun-soaked Florida palette. The Dolby
5.1 Surround mix offers a good deal of kick for a TV show, with clear dialogue
and a lot of immersive effects in the side and rear channels. There's at least
one explosion in every episode (usually a car blown up as a distraction), and
the audio track affords the action effects some powerful low-end rumble.

Though hardly packed with bonus features, Burn Notice: Season Five
contains enough supplemental content to please devoted fans. There's a
collection of deleted scenes, a decent blooper reel (both Donovan and Campbell
are funny guys), a featurette on Season Five's villains, and a commentary track
on the season finale, "Fail Safe." The mid-season episode "Army of One," in
which Michael infiltrates a group of thieves holding hostages at an airport,
appears in an "extended" format.

Don't think that the gaps in emotional logic make Season Five a bad
installment of Burn Notice. It isn't. It's about as good as any of the
others, provided you're willing to tolerate the show pretty much spinning its
wheels. The villain-of-the-week stuff remains fun, while the overall mythology
is messy and mostly unsatisfying. I'm not complaining, though. Burn
Notice is fun. It's summer. What more can we ask for?